Every Thursday afternoon for several months in 1966, my mother dressed me in a white dress with a big bow and puffy short sleeves, a Peter Pan collar and blue smocking, and drove me into the Haight-Ashbury. I wore socks that folded down and black patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother had pulled my hair straight back from my forehead and tied a hank of it in a blue ribbon. And, in a dark basement room in a large Victorian house on the edge of Buena Vista Park, I was given a chair to sit on and told not to move.

In that way, my portrait was painted.

That portrait hung on the dining room wall throughout my childhood and adolescence, where I sat every night with my back to it. When my mother died, my father hung it above the fireplace in his apartment. That’s where it was the night he died, and where it stayed for months, after his clothes has been donated and his furniture sold. One night, a childhood friend stopped by to visit and exclaimed upon seeing the portrait she recognized from some 30 years ago.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But what am I going to do with it?”

She looked at me, shocked. “Why, treasure it forever of course!”

Jump ahead a few years. I’ve moved, bringing with me the portrait to hang on my bedroom wall with what I intended as irony. After all, who seriously displays a portrait of herself on her bedroom wall? (I recall Scarlett O’Hara, whose full-length portrait becomes the target for Rhett Butler’s whiskey glass. Like stealing Frank Kennedy from her sister and decorating her Atlanta house in carpetbagger-aesthetic red velvet, the portrait shows how far our former belle has sunk.) Surely no one would see in my small portrait–whose colors go so well against the gray walls–anything but humor.

I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but as your friend…

This e-mail arrived after a Fourth of July party in which guests left their jackets in my bedroom. Have you thought about the effect that portrait has? I wonder what it says about the prominence of your childhood and your parents’ sensibilities in your life now.

So much for irony. And, yes, I replied to this (other) friend, I had thought about it. But storing the portrait in the closet seemed even more fraught with psychological juju. And I certainly can’t throw it away. As for her other concern–what would other people think?–well, I’m not letting just anyone into my bedroom.

And yet.

I took it down and propped it against the wall. That was five weeks ago.

The portraitist was named Werner Phillips. I remember his studio as a dark basement room, and his person as gray-haired with a mustache and wearing a suit – kind of a bohemian Grandpa Munster. I remember the walk to his house from Haight Street, where we always parked, my mother gripping my hand as we passed the teenagers in colorful long skirts and headbands and beaded vests, sprawled on the wide stretch of lawn. The Summer of Love was only six months away, and yet this world–where “Mary Jane” meant something quite different from a black patent-leather party shoe–seemed exotic, faraway, even alien. No one looked like that back home on our street.

My mother commissioned the portrait as a gift for my father. For him, for posterity, for years of hanging on the wall, she groomed me the way she wanted me. A proper little girl. And yet when I look at the portrait, I see the ways in which I resisted. (You can’t see my legs in the portrait, but I recall the blood stains on my “good socks” from a scabbed knee I picked and picked.) I squirmed and sighed during those portrait sessions, though my smile and eyes look calm, almost drowsy. Years later, in a moment of teenage struggle, I would shout at her just before slamming a door: “I’m not your little girl in a smocked dress anymore!”

I see all that–and my parents’ tenderness, too, their love for me, as well as an adult’s continued negotiation with the tensions of the past. I see a window into another time, not just the Haight of 1966 and our family dining room–but a time when my parents were healthy and young and took care of me.

Both my friends were right, to a point. “Treasure” is, at best, a fraught word in respect to the past. Give it too much due and it takes over, and not always for the best. And yet I can never deny the prominence of my childhood on my life, even if I don’t have to wake up every morning looking at it.

Like many adult decisions, this one straddles two approaches. Maybe it’s not even a decision as much as a refusal to make one, a choice to live in ambiguity and ambivalence. So: neither the trash heap nor the prized spot over the mantle. Just propped against a side wall, present and accounted for but not center stage, a good a place as any.